Japanese lawmakers ask for Glendale statue of ‘comfort women to be taken down

Some members of Japan’s House of Representatives told the city of Glendale in California to take down a memorial put up to honor women from Korea, China and other countries that were forced to become sexual slaves by the Japanese Army in the Second World War. The three members are all from the conservative Japan Restoration Party, a political party that has numerous members seated in the National Diet. Mio Sugita from the Hyogo Prefecture, Yuzuru Nishida of Chiba and Hiromu Nakamura of Hiroshima were in Los Angeles for a study mission on the memorial that sparked a lot of controversy both in and out of Japan.

While a lot of former comfort women told of horror stories of being forced into sexual slavery, a fact that even the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has written in its website, there is still a huge number of Japanese, including the three lawmakers, who say that these women acted out of their own accord and that the number indicated, around 80,000 to 100,000 comfort women, were greatly exaggerated. Aside from asking the statue to be put down, they also want the account of the comfort women issue on the ministry website to be changed and for Parliament to renounce the previous apology to comfort women given during the 1990s.

The three members also met with a Japanese veteran who is against the statues and two Japanese-American groups, Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress and the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League, who are both championing the cause of comfort women all over the world. Kathy Masaoka, co-chair of Nikkei for Civil Rights & Redress said in a phone interview that, “They wanted to say this is an issue for Japan, that it’s not an international issue, but that’s not the way the rest of the world is looking at it.” Some Korean-American groups are busy trying to put up more statues to increase awareness of the matter and force Japan to come up with an official resolution of apology while the three members push for a change in Japan’s treatment of the comfort women issue. The three hoped that their two countries can set the issue aside and continue to work together even with their differences.

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Hide Behind

You can go to hell, how is that in plain American English!
American men and women died because of your nations criminality; Yet it was not just for your criminal acts against this nation and our close allies your People of the Phillipines but for your debauchery practiced over every peoples you conquered.
Yet to this day you have not come too full apology for such heinous crimes, and only corporate and national economic interest have been the cause of partial and blatantly apparent excuses not apology.
The expression of our national disgust for any nation that has done such actions resides not just in a few statues but our national character.
You cannot nor should you for all your commercial means thrown at lesser men we have elected or appointed to high office be allowed to hide such history.
HANDS OFF
For your nation to even suggest such a removal is proof you have not advance d much beyond those times you committed such acts.
I write only as my personal inner character and realize many give not a damn but I find lack of any show of National Acts of Honor even today when you deliberately lie to your own people and threaten the whole of my nation by your corruption and fear of economic losses by your actions at your nuclear plant disasters.

Megatron

Stupid comment. How’s that in plain English. You’re not even an American.

Shuami

“How’s that in plain English”
How’s that NOT plain English??

“You’re not even an American.’
And how do you know that? You have proof that he is NOT??

Yoda42

The horrible crimes against the Asian and Dutch women who were removed from their homes in Korea, China, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, East Timor and Indonesia, to be coerced into sexual slavery are crimes against all humanity. These memorials, like Holocaust memorials, need to be everywhere including Japan to remind ourselves to never let it be repeated again. The few but loud objectors from Japan are deniers of the past and raison d’être for these memorials in the first place.

Hide Behind

My ancestor was the bastard son of an English soldier and an Irish Maiden; a maiden at least by tales of yore, and he ran from criminality of Britain to the Massachusetts Colony In the Mid 1600’s.
There began my claimed but given lineage, As fine a lot of Americans as any American since the first time when the word American was spoken and written down with my ancestors blood.
I claim no fame nor shame by their actions but only by my own and I will not pull back from my views that it is not only Japan that has had its military treat conquered women with bestial and brutish actions ; For too this day the American military man abuses and uses women world wide in manners no different now than your military once did in its past
Why are such acts by American military in Japan and Okinawa so easily dismissed; just a woman or fear of offending a good customer?
I condemn my nations hypocracy even more
harshly than other nations soldiery, for they disgrace my familys ideals of what is right and good , ideals that no peoples should
destroy lest they too,man or woman, become
themselves objects of brutes in need for comfort.
There is no honor in defaming and abusing the weak, only shame.
So yes, I live on American soil, but I am in wh p and what I choose love of my fellow man over any Corporate Flag.

Shinrin Soh

I think Japan is not denying that women were hurt during the war. They are denying that Japanese government was involved. There are many prostitutes around US naval bases overseas. If you say that the White House is involved in establishing those services, I am sure president Obama would stand up and fight against such claim.

I am not sure what Koreans want here. To tell the world how much they hate the Japanese? And tell the world to hate the Japanese as much as they do? I have a few words of advice to my Korean friends. Stop that. Because you will lose your friends instead and because people are not stupid.

We know what you the Korean did in Vietnam during the Vietnam war. Just google “Lai Dai Han”.

To my Korean friends, look at yourself before blaming others. Grow up and get a life.
Build a statue for all the women who suffered in wars, including the 100s of thousands of women that you raped in Vietnam.

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